Bergsonism

The first movement of Bergsonism begins, like a compiler, by bootstrapping itself. It must ask the meta-question: How does one ask the right sorts of questions? This is the task of thought that Deleuze via Bergson challenges us to undertake, the adventure of doing philosophy that begins not with reading the right canon of philosophers and engaging with the right sorts of questions but rather asking what even are the right questions? A better-fitted word for this meta-theoretical plane that is created by asking what it means to ask the right kinds of questions is "intuition", the Bergsonian method, which has three rules and two corollaries:

1. Identify whether problems themselves are true or false. Ask questions that produce problems which are also solved when correctly stated.
   1. There are two sorts of false problems: Problems which are nonexistent because they think in confused and imprecise terms of "more" and "less", and problems that are badly stated because they have badly analyzed composites.
2. Struggle against the human tendency to think in terms of difference in degree and discover real differences in kind.
   1. The real is not just differences in kind but also lines of difference that converge in a single ideal point that produces those lines.
3. State and solve problems in terms of time rather than space.

Deleuze via Bergson locates the singularity that all minor philosophy is varying lines of flight from: How do we think about the sorts of things that exist in the world in an intuitive way? What we want is to avoid succumbing to the all-too-human tendency to compare our perception of the real with whatever recollections we already have of them, or much worse to become subordinated to a canon of theory that we're told is the correct way to think about things. Deleuze's (and Guattari's) entire project is among other things a rebellion against the hegemony of western philosophy that had already formed in the 60s, even in the supposedly radical continental milieu. This originates in the radical assertion Deleuze makes via Bergson that all major (i.e. orthodox, hegemonical, etc.) philosophy has been engaged in a long game of telephone, essentially, thinking in unintuitive terms. Intuition even in a colloquial sense captures how Deleuze's Bergson thinks philosophy ought to be done, because it implies a state of being prior to any kind of mediating signs, prior to language even. For Deleuze's Bergson, in order to ask the right sorts of questions, we need to be able to identify what produces our concept of a being, what differentiates it in kind, rather than thinking in terms of negation, of how it compares or relates to concepts that someone in a canon of philosophers has already written about.

It's crucial to understand that Deleuze's minor philosophy aligns itself with heterodoxical genealogy of philosophers (Bergson, Nietzsche, Spinoza, etc.) because thinking unintuitively, in terms of negation, of resemblance or proximity to different philosophers' concepts, is the orthodoxical method. This is why academic philosophy has over its entire history become increasingly gatekept, academic, elitist, and most importantly a controlled opposition: the great dead white men of western civilization weigh on the brains of philosophy students. Major philosophy, along with the academic humanities in general, is no longer a living tradition; even if it isn't blatant idolatry of the dead, in its control modality it is a metaphysical imperialism that continually expands outwards assimilating the Other into the discourses that the Same has already decided the rules of. The Bergsonian method of intuition is meant to be an antidote to this.

Deleuze's Bergson denounces thinking in terms of negation because it is essentially arbitrary. The question of being and non-being ("why is there something rather than nothing?") is an example of this sort of thinking because it makes an arbitrary distinction between different kinds of beings and then defines everything in relation to Being, which must be some sort of Platonic form of the Same. Why should Being be the One or the being-in-the-world of Dasein? All of major philosophy from the point of view of minor philosophy seems to be little more than Nietzsche's "philosophical laborers" arguing with each other over why theirs is the most correct definition of Being, or the Good, or the Beautiful, whatever big important concepts that ultimately can be traced back to the Greeks. Rarely does anyone seem to ask whether or not it's even worth it to take part in this long discourse and what the motivations behind it are in the first place. Again invoking Nietzsche, we could better understand these philosophers by starting by first asking what their values are that lead them to make the assertions they do rather than asking whether or not their ideas are "true" or not.

Deleuze's Bergson is a hacker's philosopher. The whole game of orthodox philosophy is a losing game for him where the only winning move is to not play at all. Philosophy should instead be clever, precise, well-engineered, a kind of calculus for questions of the most general sort. This will especially come into play later as Deleuze makes reference to Riemannian multiplicity and is important for a general understnding of Deleuze's philosophy where he talks about difference in terms of mathematical differentials rather than semiotic Otherness. All of this however must also be for the sake of producing new concepts rather than engaging in the miserable laborious toil of major philosophy and its metaphysical superstructures, much like the clever hacker solves a problem elegantly because ultimately she is too lazy, unmotivated, and without any respect for authority to write a Big Important Program that looks impressive to a manager. A hacker and a Deleuzian both have no patience for monotonous toil or the managerial mindset.

As laid out at the start, the Bergsonian method is in fact a method for asking the right sorts of questions and in Deleuze's analysis there are three steps to do this. Like a clever hacker, the first step is to decide what sorts of problems are worth solving and then figure out how to state them properly. Deleuze often talks in terms of how a problem is "posited" because it should be thought of in terms of posit-ivity, of producing some new concept, which is an important distinction for understanding why this requires resisting the all-too-human tendency to think in terms of degree or negation. The logic of negation is an illusion that the image or appearance of something produces; it doesn't tell us anything new about the world but rather is subordinated to some preexisting concept and then simply restates it in terms that appear different. Even people like philosophers who are supposedly engaged in the highly technical task of thinking correctly have more often than not failed at telling us anything new about the world.

As we remember from Hume, Kant, and Heidegger, we humans are very deeply engaged with the phenomenal world around us. So much so in fact that in a Bergsonian analysis we find that we have a tendency to create false problems that arise from thinking in terms of difference in degree or intensity, because this is what it's like to be a Dasein. We are always perceiving the world in such a way that different phenomena are being focused on while others are excluded and kept in a loop until we focus on them. For Deleuze's Bergson, there is no clear difference in kind between the phenomenal world and the mind if we're thinking of it in very rigorous and technical terms, but those aren't how we actually experience the real. In pure perception, we are at once put into matter when we perceive it, and on the other hand in pure recollection we are put at once into the mind. For Deleuze's Bergson, these are the two forms that representation (Vorstellung) takes, and they are always ambiguously mixed with each other in our actual experiences of them. We never access pure recollection or pure perception where we are absolutely put at once into purely mind or purely matter, and so we are always lead to believe that what we perceive is also the pure concept we have of it, and this inevitably leads to all sorts of confusions that lead to us creating false problems and not being able to think properly.

We are now left with an armed reactionary uprising to Kant's Copernican Revolution: Your brain, in fact, tricks you into believing that the things it perceives are really what you think they are. We Dasein are in fact not so easily able to be-in-the-world, nor are we easily able to form concepts of it; we are always biased towards focusing on different things and comparing them to other things we have memories of because we've arbitrarily chosen a memory of something to be the Platonic form of it.² In order to use the Bergsonian method of intuition, we have to go beyond the "state" of experience and towards its "conditions" – or, in the terms of C&S, look past the molar formations towards the molecular processes that produce them. Having this context is essential to understanding why it really is, in the most abstract and technical of philosophical terms, that Deleuze and Guattari reject economies of lack in favor of affirmative, vitalistic flows and productions of desire. Deleuze via Bergson opens Bergsonism with a meta-theoretical question, how do we ask the right sorts of questions, and then demonstrates his own concept of properly posited questions that produce problems by showing that false problems arise from the conditions of experience and that this is itself a problem because we are biased to constantly create false problems. Though Deleuze's writing is much more formal during his academic period compared to his later collaborations with Guattari, he already anticipates the CCRU and Nyx Land in establishing that the task of thought requires us to go beyond the all-too-human state of affairs we're condemned to. Ultimately, the goal of minor philosophy is "To open us up to the inhuman and the superhuman"³ or to the Outside as Nick Land called it. We create useful assemblages of concepts, not totalizing systems, so that we may rise above the confused ignorance of the merely-human and become something better than human – an Übermensch perhaps.

In order to understand how we use the Bergsonian method to get to the conditions of perception, the "articulations of the real",⁴ we need to understand how Deleuze utilizes technical Bergsonian terminology like "contraction/relaxtion". In the original French, the term is détente, which Bergson uses in a physics sense rather than the sense of relaxation-détente that English borrowed from French to mean a relaxing of (usually political) tensions. It should instead be thought of as a compressed spring, or once again invoking C&S we could instead think of it as a very dense rock: In a contracted state, something has a high amount of potential energy that isn't being expressed, many different lines of flight that are waiting to be realized, while in a relaxed state it is in a low state of intensity and high degree of expressivity. When something is relaxed, we see the many potential lines of flight of a molecular process somewhere at the root of them, and our task is to go down those lines to find their most contracted and intensified state where the "decisive turn"⁵ happens that makes them articulations of the real. Crucially, the "movements" of intuition work by these two divergent lines that also converge as they become increasingly contracted. There aren't merely two lines that appear to be different or unrelated to each other; any appearance of difference is merely a shadow of their differential. The differential is the intense convergence that produces the extensive diverging lines.

Deleuze notes that contraction-relaxation is one of many Bergsonian dualisms, and we have already seen another (perception-recollection) that in fact demonstrates how we make use of the method for determining what things differ in kind and are cut-outs of the real. The dualism (or syzygy) of perception and recollection is created from a point of maximum contraction that creates two divergent and increasingly relaxed lines. Phenomenal experience is a composite, and the elements that differ in kind are those processes or conditions that produce the two lines within which all sorts of different experiences of the world are produced. Crucially, these lines are not all possible experience in the Kantian sense but rather are real experience, the sorts of biased and subjective experiences of the world we tend to form, and an important distinction from Kantian philosophy that is hopefully becoming clear is that the Bergsonian method requires us to think in relation to time.

We are accustomed not just in our everyday experiences but also in philosophy to thinking of things in terms of spatiality. Metaphysics, in the technical philosophical sense, is something that Deleuze as a philosopher's philosopher is very concerned with, but going all the way back to Aristotle the entire field of metaphysics has been founded on thinking in terms of spatiality by focusing on dividing up the given. As popular as the idea is of trying to live in the present moment, we tend to think that the present moment is also eternal, that all the molar formations that make up the given, whatever mere appearances of things there are right now, are also the things in themselves. If we have no knowledge of biology for instance, we might see a raven and a crow and because they look very similar group them into the same category of birds, or we might see a male and female black widow spider and group them into separate categories because they look very different. In either case, we are engaged in an ultimately arbitrary act of dividing up the real based on the image of it rather than the processes that produce it, and if we are committed to thinking in very precise terms we have to recognize that thinking in terms of spatiality, of extension, is always itself thinking in terms of negation. We divide up the world according to whatever concepts we're already biased towards comparing them to, decide on divisions of things because they look right for our purposes even though any division of things can strictly speaking be infinitely divided. Zeno's most famous paradox of movement ultimately arises from this sort of thinking, and no doubt the Greeks' vested interest in making geometry an idealized model and method of thought has only exacerbated this if it is really a bias in human perception and cognition.

Flipping this tradition in philosophy and in our own perceptual biases on its head by thinking in terms of time is the third and fundamental rule of the Bergsonian method of intuition. A Bergsonian thinks not in terms of a division of the given but rather in terms of what states a particular thing has across a duration, another technical Bergsonian term that denotes specifically a psychological experience of change, transition, or becoming that endures. By thinking in terms of duration, with the intention of seeing how it is that one thing becomes another, we're able to pull back the many different masks of mere appearances that molecular processes wear. While Deleuze via Bergson presents all of this as a very abstract philosophical exercise, it's important to understand how this informs his later collaborations with Guattari and what practical upshot it has for radicals. A wealth of theory exists attempting to explain what fascism is and how it works, with no single accepted answer to this question, yet fascism is also paradoxically something that you know when you see it (much like the famous statement about pornography). On the other hand, fascism's passive aggressive twin liberalism has a relatively accepted definition even within radical circles yet is very effective at concealing itself. The disciplinary fascist societies wield a form of power that is so ancient and so pervasive in the miserable merely-human condition that we have all experienced it at some point, but the liberal societies of control are a much newer evolution of power. Control came into existence in roughly the past 50 years alongside the advent of modern, highly complex, globalized and networked civilizations with mass media propaganda apparatuses distributed all throughout it, like the ubiquitous cameras in 1984. But what George Orwell, famous anticommunist snitch and colonialist, got wrong is that the televisions don't need cameras in them and don't need to be constantly surveiling the proles to keep them under control.

If the left or any other grouping of radicals is ever going to become a relevant political force again, it should give its due to understanding Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy in order to understand how power has evolved since the 19th and early/mid 20th centuries. Contrary to the anti-intellectual Analytic/positivist propaganda that has eventually trickled down to many so-called radicals, Deleuze even at his most academic is far from being a detached ivory tower academic.⁶ His ideas are directly useful to going beyond a simple and linear understanding of history that we've been cursed with thanks to Hegel and create a sharper analysis of the tools that the enemy uses against us. The time I've personally spent witnessing the rebirth under Trump and Biden of a broad left with some amount of mainstream pull and engagement outside of its own incestuous discourses has only further convinced me of the need for a proper revival of Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy informed by its potential practical applications. D&G should not be reduced to merely whatever practical value they have, but as with the hacker analogy, the best way to see if our concepts are useful is by doing things with them.⁷ Time and time again I've seen self-described leftists be captured by the societies of control because there aren't any traditions of resistance that have a concept of control in the Deleuzian and cybernetic sense. This is why it keeps working and why it seems like there is no alternative, because no one who cares to abolish the current state of things really understands what monsters capitalism has created.

The system doesn't merely surveil and dispatch the cops whenever it detects any deviant desires; it also produces more desires that are intelligible within its codes and continually deforms itself to capture and recuperate desires that it couldn't have accounted for. It doesn't need to see everything if it creates such a sufficiently well-stocked marketplace of desires that the subjects of the societies of control believe they really do have the freedom to do or be whatever they want. Present enough choices so that the marketplace is mistaken for a neutral plane of immanence, and if any desire doesn't have a product that approximates it, start stocking new products to capture a new market. Under liberalism, the most oppressed and marginalized are always consequently at the mercy of a micropolitics that is similar to (but not equivalent to!) settler-colonialism: their experiences and cultures are always being simultaneously erased and expropriated but also assimilated into the majority or core which replaces them with a simulacra-commodity that exists in a state of "difference without opposition". This is because the downside of a system that has wholly surrendered itself to the logic of the market is that if it isn't constantly expanding into new markets it burns itself out. Much like Bitcoin, it trades decentralization for a high computational cost; every node is always having to perform computations using the codes of the present state of things.

Having a pantheon of eternal forms or values – God, the State, whiteness, maleness, straightness, and various other spooks – to discipline in relation to has historically shown to not be a very effective form of power. When a system is in a state of starvation or existential danger it becomes rigid, but to maintain equilibrium its default state needs its own codes that can adapt to changes in the environment and history. Becoming-human, and consequently becoming-man, becoming-white, is the code that liberalism uses to keep itself stable: everything that is Other can always become Same, and so the societies of control can change the mere appearances of things. But since it is their codes, their definition of "human", their definition of who is worthy of rights and who isn't, this all happens under coercion. Get with the program or the invisible hand of the marketplace of identity becomes the iron fist of fascism. The old settler-colonialist lede, "kill the Indian, save the man" most concisely illustrates what is fundamentally the logic of liberalism.

If the idea of thinking in terms of time/duration still seems imprecisely defined, in the next chapter we'll see in more detail how the Bergsonian concept of duration actually works.

We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. This is true for the entire universe.

In the first chapter Deleuze develops his interpretation of the Bergsonian method of intuition as having three (or five) rules and ends by making use of that very same method to ask a question: How does intuition "presuppose" duration and give it a "new extension from the point of view of being and knowledge"? A less cryptic way of putting this is that in the second chapter, we see Deleuze develop on the Bergsonian method by establishing a dualism, two diverging lines, between duration and extension where duration is the primary line, the eponymous "immediate datum" of chapter two. If we are rejecting thinking in terms of negation to discover true differences in kind, we must understand how differences in kind differentiate themselves. Deleuze via Bergson starts by analyzing perception, which is a composite from which we need to untangle subjective duration from objective extension, because as Deleuze says, duration is "not merely lived experience; it is also experience enlarged or even gone beyond; it is already a condition of experience."⁸ In order to do precise philosophy, to reject privileging the image of objective extension as rule #2 of the Bergsonian method states, we need to understand what about perception is not arbitrary.

Because Deleuze here presupposes some familiarity with the concept of duration, it's helpful to refer to Bergson himself. He recaps the concept of duration in the opening of Creative Evolution, noting that duration is not meant to describe a "block" of time; while this distinction will become more apparent in subsequent chapters, a helpful concept to invoke here is discrete and continuous multiplicities.⁹ For the time being, all that we need to understand about the discrete and continuous is that the two concepts are analogous to differences in degree and kind, respectively; the discrete is some measurement of space while the continuous is a topological object persisting before becoming something else. This animation of a torus (the "donut" shape) is helpful for visualizing what a continuous multiplicity is: There are varying degrees of deformation that a torus can undergo while still remaining a torus before it degenerates into being a sphere, which is an altogether different continuous multiplicity. However, the different degrees of deformation of the torus are different discrete multiplicities that have different measurements.

This relates to duration because in English, the word "duration" is misleading without making it clear that it is a technical term that, as Bergson says, does not denote a block of quantitative time. This is crucial: duration has nothing to do with what is measurable, and thinking in terms of time does not mean time as a quantity. Were this the case, we would be arbitrarily giving philosophical privilege to the frequency by which a piece of quartz vibrates; while this qquantitative measurement of time has practical uses, it is wholly inappropriate to reference for doing philosophy. This position of rejecting what is quantitative and measurable – the tendency to think in terms of negation, extension, or difference in degree – is one of the core parts of Bergsonian and Deleuzian philosophy and will be especially important later on when talking about Bergson's debate with Einstein. Neither Deleuze nor Bergson reject scientific knowledge, but they do reject the ontological hyperfascist tendency to make technical knowledge of a linearly causal, classically Newtonian world into something of philosophical import.

Duration is thus continuous rather than discrete; it can be infinitesimally divided, in just the same way that we can take any quantitative measurement of time and divide it futher and further, but qualitatively duration remains the same. Bergson helpfully compares the distinction to visualizing experience as a staircase versus a slope: though we may perceive individual changes in state, our perception of some changes in state over others are not duration but rather arbitrary discrete changes we happen to notice. An incomplete but helpful example of this is to imagine a particular song you may have listened to many times: if you were to listen to it again, you will likely not perceive any particular difference in it compared to all the other times you've listened to the song. It will seem as though there is no difference in kind. But if you were to listen to the same song after drinking a bottle of cough syrup containing dextromethorphan, you would notice a new depth to the song, pick up on subtleties that were previously being filtered out in a sober state of mind, due to how dissociative drugs neurologically affect our perception of sound. The same would be true for listening to the same song with different audio encodings, such as a lossless FLAC file or a bitrotted MP3, listening to the same song with headphones or speakers – and this is all from the perspective of a single perceiver. Two different people may have an entirely different perception of the same piece of music depending on their psychological states and the cultural context that informs their understanding of aesthetics.

As noted, however, this example is also incomplete and misleading. In Bergson's concept of duration, the possibility for the same image to be perceived in infinitely many ways is key to understanding his theory of perception and experience, but it goes beyond the mere image we form of something. Whether we notice it or not, every instance of duration no matter how infinitesimally divided is different, absolutely unlike any other. Duration isn't merely a matter of perspective where the exact same image (such as a song in a lossless format) being perceived by the exact same person (someone in a sober state of mind) will produce the same perception of the image; rather, each instant of perceiving something, even something that seems to not change, is also being framed by everything that has come before our perception of it. This is why memory is an important concept for Bergson: duration is not merely the present being continually replaced with another instant, or else in Bergson's view we would not perceive anything. It would be like being in a constant state of death and rebirth. In another work, Bergson describes duration as two spools of thread where one end is at every instant accumulating more thread and the other running out; the accumulating thread is memory, the thread running out is matter (how much longer we have left to live), and between the two is duration which is defined by being both continuous and heterogenous. Duration is continuous because it always remains qualitatively itself, but it is heterogeneous because it is constantly becoming some new deformation of itself.

Returning to Bergsonism with a definition of duration: Deleuze notes that Bergson's definition of perception is a composite of discrete and continuous multiplicities, of extension (space) and duration, and to utilize the Bergsonian method of intuition we need to separate the two lines into pure space and pure duration to understand how it is that duration is the condition for quantiative spatial perception. Or, in other words, we need to separate the two in order to understand why it is that in the composite of perception we seem to arbitrarily pick out things that seem to be changes in state or differences in kind. When we split the composite into its pure constituents, we get the two types of multiplicity mentioned previously: the discrete and the continuous. Discrete multiplicity corresponds to spatiality, while continous multiplicity corresponds to duration; the discrete is quantitative, actual, and denotes a difference in degree, while the continuous is qualitative, virtual, and denotes a difference in kind.

As mentioned previously, multiplicity will be developed further in future chapters and it'd be far too easy to veer off into another long tangent to explain a concept that has such an extensive background in advanced mathematics, but for the time being we can elaborate further on it by explaining what it is about multiplicity that is multiple. This question is important and tricky enough that even someone like Alain Badiou, one of the most prestigious living philosophers, managed to fundamentally misunderstand it and turn it into the basis for the argument in his embarrassing rant about potatoes:

At the heart of the matter, there is the idea that the mass uprising of May '68 - as unprecedented popular revolt - in the eyes of its intellectual protagonists would not have had a tangible class background and that, for this reason, it would be conceivable as an insurrection of the multiple. Students, workers, employees seemed to have risen up in parallel fashion, in a kind of horizontal storm, or a cumulative dispersion, in which on top of everything the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia could vindicate the role of tactical vanguard.

[…]

It unleashed into the clouds of pure thought the storm of the Multiple against the pretensions of the One. Down with the centres, whatever they are! Long live dispersion as such! Ontology returned to the Megarian school: only the multiple is affirmative, whereas the One is its oppressive spectre, puffed up with resentment.¹⁰

This post is not an attempt at a polemic with Badiou, but the passage above is illustrative of exactly the position that Deleuze devoted a great deal of his work to trying to resist and develop a more philosophically precise alternative to. On display in "The Fascism of the Potato" is the exact sort of thinking in terms of appearance/negation that Deleuze via Bergson is critical of in the previous chapter. Badiou's argument seems to hinge entirely on a misreading of what "multiplicity" even means in Deleuze's philosophy – which just so happens to be helpful for explaining what multiplicity actually is. What Badiou calls the "multiple", an apparent shift in the May '68 French Left from a theory of the proletariat as the revolutionary subject towards many different classes, is better described as a concept of the Many, which Badiou opposes to the One, the centre, the Party. But as Deleuze emphasizes in Bergsonism: "for Bergson, it is not a question of opposing the Multiple to the One, but, on the contrary, of distinguishing two types of multiplicity."¹¹ Badiou is but one of many philosophers to make use of these confused and impure concepts of the One and Many and in doing so imposes a fundamental limit on thought.

Having touched briefly on the distinction between continuous and discrete multiplicity, distinguishing multiplicity in general from the One and the Many is fairly straightforward. Again, to avoid a long tangent on multiplicity and Bergson's criticisms of Einsteinian relativity (which will also come up later) we will for the moment focus on how duration is continuously multiple. It should be clear from the definition of discrete multiplicities how it is multiple, since there are infinitely many different ways that one can quantitatively divide something, but multiplicity is distinct from the One and Many because continuous multiplicity can likewise be infinitely divided. The difference lies in how the two multiplicities divide themselves: discrete multiplicity divides itself by spatial measurement, while continuous multiplicity divides itself continously. As previously stated, a continuous multiplicity is always itself because it is a priori at every possible instant always becoming something else; duration is a continuous multiplicity because it is by definition that which divides itself, but it divides by becoming different in kind. This is why duration is both continuous and heterogeneous; it is a special kind of multiplicity because for duration to be continuous it must be always becoming something else. Duration, and therefore also the conditions of our perception of the world, is itself because it is always other; "since each of us was several…"

To further complicate things, Deleuze makes references to Bergson's description of discrete and continuous multiplicity as they correspond to the objective and subjective and the actual and the virtual, which is yet another difficult but essential Deleuzian concept to grasp. Like multiplicity, we run the risk of getting confused with another superficially similar dualism: the Possible and the Real. Much like the One and Many, the Possible and Real do not have any relation to the virtual and actual. If a discrete multiplicity is something that can be divided in space in infinitely many (or a multiplicity) of different ways, it is objective and actual because all of a discrete multiplicity's divisions are perceptible or perceptible in principle in the object. Another way of putting this is that what is actual and objective has no virtuality; it makes no difference whether its possible divisions are realized or not, possible or real, because it already contains all concepts of itself in our perception of it. To make use of rule #2 of the Bergsonian method again: there is no relation between the Possible and the Real and the actual because Possible/Real is an arbitrary image that we form based on whatever actually exists, and we select from the actual arbitrarily. We might imagine a recording of a particular song as having a different possible encoding, for instance, but this tells us nothing about it other than that we have formed another image in relation to an image we already have. If we think about the problem a different way, we immediately apprehend what is actual in a recording of a song because whether or not we picture it, the recording contains different degrees of lossy or lossless recording, different perceptions of it in different psychological states, different segments of time in the track. Even though at a particular instant there is more in the object than the image we have of it, there is nothing more in it that can change it in kind.

At the other end of the actual and objective is the subjective and virtual, and we have not yet explained what the subjective or virtual are. Like multiplicity, virtuality will come up in more detail later, but for now we need to settle on a concise working definition of it. Our definition of actuality should demonstrate that there is no relation between the Possible/Real and virtual/actual; the actual in fact contains not just the Possible and Real but also much more. The virtual is likewise fully real, but unlike the actual, it doesn't relate to the world of extended objects. When something becomes actualized, it passes from the virtual into an actual extended object that contains all possible concepts of itself, but the virtual is the hypersea of differential relations that everything actual crawls out of, the dissociative haze at the borders of perception where we filter out things of interest. Bergson describes duration as a slope where we see a staircase, and the continuously heterogenous slope which divides itself into something different in kind at every possible division is the virtual. We never directly perceive the virtual, but it nonetheless is all around us.

This chapter of Bergsonism focuses mainly on perception, and identifying the virtual and continuous multiplicity of duration might lead us into yet another possible error, though this isn't one that Deleuze himself addresses. No doubt because of the context he was writing from, Deleuze wouldn't have foreseen that an anglophone audience in the 21st century might be inclined to think that when he says here that duration, virtuality, and continuous multiplicity are subjective, this means what I call "merely psychological." Owing to the influence of logical positivism, analytic philosophy, scientism, and various other anti-intellectual Hitlerite tendencies in the anglosphere, we're used to associating the "subjective" especially in the context of critical theory as being synonymous with perspectivism. According to the professional expert class of consequentialist utility unit accountants that pass for philosophers, critical theorists (or worse, "postmodernists") believe that there is no "objective reality" and that everything is a matter of individual perspective – projecting, as it were, a terminally western, individualist, idealist worldview that creates an all or nothing dualism between absolute Truth (unity with God) or total incoherent atomization (the outer darkness). But much like Badiou's misreading of multiplicity, perspectivism has nothing to do with what Deleuze means when he says that continuous multiplicity is subjective.

A better way of thinking about the Deleuzo-Bergsonian subjective and the pomo-perspectivist subjective is to instead call the latter the "merely psychological" because this is what the ontological hyperfascists oppose to an objective world that can be understood through extensive, scientific rationality. Bergson's famous debate with Einstein was in fact mainly about this error in the intellectual history of 20th century western civilization, where whatever is a discrete multiplicity – something quantitative, measurable, understandable by the natural sciences – became the only source of Truth. In contrast to this is the merely psychological, where our perceptions of things tell us nothing about them; every different perspective is all equally false, and yet there are some perceptions (different neurotypes, different mental states) that are simultaneously more true than others. The merely psychological is reducible entirely to an individual, isolated from the subjective processes that make each arbitrary, individual, merely psychological state possible – which includes the social context individuals exist in and that bourgeois psychology conveniently ignores. The throughline from Deleuzo-Bergsonism to Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy is quite clear from this. Reducing the subjective to being merely psychological has had real consequences for our ability to better understand the world and how to organize within it politically. All things are reduced to perceptions of linear, classically Newtonian causality, the sorts of things that sane and sober white western men are most likely to focus on, and everything else be damned. This of course is an entirely unscientific worldview as well as an entirely inappropriate way of doing philosophy, and in order to open ourselves to the inhuman and superhuman, we need to paradoxically first follow the ancient wisdom: Γνῶθι σεαυτόν ("know thyself").

What this chapter's focus on duration does is explain a particular kind of multiplicity, a particular kind of duration, that makes perception in general possible and therefore also objective, extended multiplicity, but more importantly it serves to explain duration and multiplicity in general. Subjective, continuous and qualitative multiplicity contains infinitesimal divisions of difference in kind, and the differences in kind that we consciously make note of are arbitrary, merely psychological, but the merely psychological is nonetheless a powerful bias that rule #2 of the Bergsonian method addresses and that rule #3 is meant to combat. Before we form any mental model of the world that we arbitrarily pick from, there is the virtual, continuous multiplicity of duration, the molecular process of subjective perception in general. This is the dream of being alive and perceiving the world, the web we weave and walk upon.

Once again, we're left at the end of this chapter with another question: how do the two divergent lines of duration and extension form? Or, in other words: how is it that we make the move from the virtual slope of duration – the conditions of perception that are also beyond it – towards an arbitrary extensive staircase of different objects that stand out from that virtual multiplicity? This question requires that we address an obvious counter to the mistaken concept of perspectivism: things endure not only in our perception of things but also in things themselves, i.e. in matter. Matter has its own continuous, qualitative multiplicity, and this is important to drive the point further that neither Bergson nor Deleuze are interested in a merely psychological, perspectivist position; as Deleuze says:

Psychological duration should be only a clearly determined case, an opening onto an ontological duration. Ontology should, of necessity, be possible. For duration was defined from the start as a multiplicity. Will this multiplicity not – thanks to movement – become confused with being itself? And since it is endowed with very special properties, in what sense can it be said that there are several durations; in what sense can there be said to be a single one; in what sense can one get beyond the ontological alternative of one/several? A related problem now becomes more urgent. If things endure or if there is a duration in things, the question of space will need to be reassessed on new foundations. For space will no longer simply be a form of exteriority, a sort of screen that denatures duration, an impurity that comes to disturb the pure, a relative that is opposed to the absolute: Space itself will need to be based in things, in relations between things and between durations, to belong itself to the absolute, to have its own "purity." This was to be the double progression of Bergsonian philosophy.¹²

Trying to elaborate on everything that Deleuze is talking about in this second chapter has required meandering through a general dualism of the objective/subjective, extension/duration, discrete/continuous, and thus far it may have seemed non-obvious how Deleuze and Bergson don't fall into a merely psychological perspectivism. It would seem that the Deleuzo-Bergsonian position privileges the subjective as the real source of truth and that it doesn't escape perspectivism, only succeeding in being a less vulgar form of it, but the "double progression" of Bergsonian philosophy has been to first know ourselves and then to know matter. Duration being immediate datum does not imply that our perception of the material world is ultimately an arbitrary and extensive composite that is primarily constituted by the virtual continuous multiplicity of psychological duration, but rather it follows rule #3 of the Bergsonian method: "State and solve problems in time rather than space." This is why Deleuze describes Bergsonian philosophy as a "movement" or "progression", in just the same way as the spooling thread representing the dream of perception that we weave and walk along.

Having used an analysis of duration as a molecular process to understand duration, virtuality, and multiplicity in general, in the next chapter what we have to do is move beyond perception. If Deleuzo-Bergsonism is worth taking seriously as a useful method for a more precise and intuitive philosophy, it needs to be applicable to materialist ontology.